Robotics are used in many industries, such as industrial applications (e.g., manufacturing and packaging), medical applications, and the like. Soft robotics is a developing area of robotics that provides soft, conformal, and adaptive graspers and actuators to enable robots to interact with objects in a more adaptive manner than in traditional robotics. For example, a single grasper may adapt to the size, weight, and shape of varying objects in each task, just as the human hand can.
A magnetic assembly to combine “hard” and “soft” robotics has been disclosed in A Hybrid Combining Hard and Soft Robotics, Stokes Adam A., Shepherd Robert F., Morin Stephen A., Ilievski Filip, and Whitesides George M., Soft Robotics. March 2014, 1(1): 70-74. doi:10.1089/soro.2013.0002, which article is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. However, the proposed combination of hard and soft robotics does not provide the versatility necessary to operate similar to a human.
The present disclosure is directed to the above, and other, limitations of existing systems. In particular, the present disclosure provides improvements in interfacing hard and soft robotics and also provides improved actuators.